Tag: business

Education Should Be A God-Given Right

Take a look at the map at the top of this post and tell me what’s wrong with this picture. That map shows all the countries in the world with FREE university tuition. The United States, the richest nation on Earth, is not one of them. The nations which provide free college extend beyond the usual northern European utopias which typically best the United States on every aspect. Even nations like India, Brazil, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, those all have free tuition.

In the news this week, US president Biden has agreed to pass a new measure which not only overhauls the Student Loan system, but *forgives* up to $10K in federal debt for students making less than $125K/year. The problem of spiraling Student Loan debt has long been a story of major concern to young adult citizens.

As predictably as the dawn, US Republicans are tied in knots having conniptions about Biden’s Student Loan debt forgiveness efforts. As you rattle around in the social media echo chamber, pay attention to the White House Twitter feed, which has been fast to call out hypocritical Republicans who protest Student Loan relief while also having pocketed PPP loans during the pandemic.

Somehow, all these Republicans come out of the closet, soapbox underfoot, to talk about how bad Student Loan forgiveness is for the economy, while also having had their own PPP (the Paycheck Protection Program, circa COVID-19) debt erased. Naturally, we’re all having a social media fight about it.

For example, in that thread, Representative Vern Buchanan brags that he was “a blue-collar kid who worked his way through college,” while neglecting to mention the boon that most blue-collar kids don’t get, $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven. This hypocrisy goes on and on, Republican after Republican…

Republican_PPP_loan_record

The American public is finally waking up to this inherently stupid state of affairs, where 3 generations of American professionals have been railed by the education financing system. And yet, as mad as you all are (good for you, my cosmic blueberries) you have no idea how much madder you should be!

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My Latest Multimedia Productions…

(*blowing dust off WordPress*)

Jesus holy mother of peasants and pumpkins hail Mary! HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN? March 2022, right when Putin invaded Ukraine. Since then, I’ve shifted gears a lot in my freelance livin’ work. It’s kept me THAT busy, so that is the excuse slip I have for not blogging on my own site for 5 months.

OTOH, I have always said that you should know me by my work, with my domain only functioning as a central hub. Judge me not by my poor stats at penguinpetes.com, but by my freelance work over on a YouTube channel with 3.5K subscribers.

Aw, what’s that, you say? You want to see some of Unca Pete’s video reviews for the $25 billion cannabis industry? Right this way, and be sure to stay tuned for more podcast news following…

69 views nice

nice…

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From the Trenches of #2022 : Your War Blogger

Good morning, and how are all my cosmic blueberries? Here, if you need a mood fix, there’s a gallery of hippie New Age good vibes I threw together on an old IMGUR post.

Sorry for not catching up more, but things have been busy. Blah blah blah, Pete doesn’t blog enough, blah blah, I don’t have time to boost my own site because I’m too busy boosting my clients’ sites.

I’ve also been hypnotized by the endless Doomscrolling feed of world news like the rest of you. Ukraine Putin Russia COVID climate change. Bad news all around. I’ve been telling you all it would get this bad years ago.

I Predicted Everything!

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much of the year 2022 I prophesied, years and years ago. I’ve been tracing this line between Trump and Putin since Sally Yates got fired – yes, remember her, New Years’ Eve, 2017?

Trump-fires-Yates

Oh, I am sure that we are all shocked at Vladimir’s Putin’s INSANE and senseless massacre of Ukraine, as well as his own soldiers, citizens, economy, etc. But, boys and girls, I have been following this yellow brick road a long ol’ time. Won’t you join me on my adventures?

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My latest adventures in Content Marketing…

Blah blah blah Pete doesn’t post often enough, blah blah blah I’m too busy working for clients to look into my own website. My own site is so neglected it’s a wonder they haven’t opened a Spirit Halloween here yet. Blah blah blah there I’m blogging now.

I see tweets like this all the time:

Except I’m a BLOGGER, so while everybody else posts a onesie-twosie WIP, I’m seeing my projects go by in a blur. Today is October 12th.

Here’s a round-up of everything I’ve been busy as a bee with in just this past month, right after the jump.

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How To Work From Home : A Survival Guide For The Hardwood Jungle

Forgive me, I should have written this guide sooner in the pandemic. Just didn’t think it would really be needed. But now that the global pandemic is a permanent thing for a while, and so many of you are clamoring for some of my work-from-home magic, I will share my tricks of the trade.

While a 9-5 job wage-slave working remotely can benefit from some of these tips anyway, this guide is written for the freelance / professional point of view.

toddler-on-phone

[1] I’m sorry, you need self-discipline.

Do me a favor: Take a deep breath and then scream “GATEKEEPER!” at me as loud as you can. Now that we have that out of the way, I’m sorry, but nature imposes this gate, not me. Either you are a self-starter and able to discipline yourself, or you will fail. If you say, “I can’t self-dicipline,” make yourself do it. Learn how. Give yourself a new chance, maybe things have changed.

Of course, there’s days when I don’t want to work, there’s tasks I dread, there’s deadlines that I procrastinate because, to be frank, it’s fun and I perform amazing under pressure. But I get the thing done! It always eventually comes down to “it is time to sit down and plow through this unpleasant task.” There are no shortcuts, no tricks. Just start doing the work and let the momentum carry you. Really, you were doing the same thing for a boss when you worked 9-to-5. Now you get to reap the full spoils of your labor, so that’s even more motivation, right?

Wanting to work from home without self-discipline is like wanting to be a lifeguard without learning to swim.

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Work From Home Freelance Writers: How Much To Charge?

Work From Home is the new hot trend in the COVID era. After my 20+ years in freelancing over the Internet, you’re all finally catching up to me. Good (at least I think so)! For freelancer content writers who are just starting out, the #1 most common question I see asked is about how to set rates.

I’m going to try to tell you in the clearest possible way how to set your rates as a freelance writer.

freelance-writing-rate-charge

How Much To Charge For Freelance Content Writing? (short answer)

The short answer to how much to charge is a simple formula:

  • a: Your rate per word
  • b: How many words you can write per hour (reasonably)

If A x B = a decent hourly wage for where you live, that’s a reasonable rate to charge. As a basic rule of thumb.

There’s a lot of fudge factors that affect this number, however. The content you will be writing may be faster or slower going due to the need for extensive research. The amount of non-writing effort you have to put into the project (spreadsheets, managing WordPress, communicating with the client’s team, etc.) may take up some time worth billing for too.

If I’m just raw typing on a subject I already know pretty well, I can easily do 500 words per hour. Nitpicky research, needing to format things in HTML, having to provide images, those slow me down to an average of about ~200 wph. By that point, I tend to bill by the hour instead.

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Anatomy of a Scam Link-Building Spammer Service

Dear website maintainers, editors, and eCommerce entrepreneurs:

Want a successful business? Then you’d better not deal with SubmitCore! They advertise themselves as a link-building service. I explain what a link-building service is about here, and also tell you how to do it yourself for free.

Just to reiterate, the whole point of guest-posting is to have your fine article hosted on an established website, while also linking back to your own website. Google sees the high-ranking authority site with a link to you and awards your site Pageranking points. But to be successful, your copy must be not just non-spammy, not just competent, but really great! Here is a knock-out article on Guest-Posting 101.

But some people would rather go through a paid service, and I have no truck with them. There are some good guest-posting services out there, and it is a legitimate business if done right. But don’t rely on Submit Core. I award them zero out of infinity stars, no points, last place in any contest that matters.

Now, I have not actually done business with SubmitCore. Instead, they tried to do business with me… if there is any “they” there and the whole thing isn’t just a bot. So let’s back up and I’ll share the whole story…

write_for_Dab_Connection-640x360
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Epiphanies After the Apocalypse

I survived the cyberpunk end times, and never got to assemble my own Mad Max warrior tribe. I got my COVID shots and never got weird mutant superpowers. I ventured out of my survivalist seclusion and found out the world is going to keep going.

Recently we’ve all emerged from COVID quarantine, and my household bravely ventured out to public life again. My first time dining out at an actual restaurant took some adjustment.

My darling wife of 30 years, Mrs. Penguin, could not afford to lose her cool. She is a patient woman, and I speak here as a man who is an expert at being impossible to take out in public. She sat in Felix & Oscars enjoying her personal pizza and margarita, happily munching and slurping away. I was eating too, but nervously. My sweaty hands gripped the table. My eyes scanning madly from side to side around the room. I assured her that I too, was having fun.

But inside my dumpster of a neurotic brain, I was screaming: “AAAAAAAAAAHHHH! I’M SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE!!!!”

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Dear Service Industry : Have You Tried Just Not Being Such Huge Assholes?

Is there a new wind blowing through Capitalism? One can only hope so!

There’s this great big Bolshevik revolution going on, if you hear pop media tell it, where all the low-paid service workers are scurrying away from their greasy deep-fried enslavement to give the McFinger to McJobs. Ostensibly it’s merely about the low pay, but I’m writing this to point out that other factors don’t help the situation.

Leftycartoons

But yes, the media hype has it that “We All Quit!” It’s just “take this job and shove it,” all day every day. In the background, there’s a political war going on (when isn’t there?) to raise the minimum wage. Of course, the true story here is not that there is a “labor shortage” like these retail slave pits claim, but rather a wage shortage.

Trotsky_worker_shortage

OK, employers, the ball is in your court. You’ll have to do better than $7.25 an hour, a figure set nearly a generation ago. But in the meantime, while you fondle your change purse and wonder how you’re going to pay for all this, may I suggest an appeasement measure to your disgruntled workforce, which is also a cost-practical solution?

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I For One Welcome Our Visigoth Overlords

You can’t deny that 2021 is shaping up to be a different year from 2020. We have the same ol’ virus, but we threw out everything else we can get our hands on. The smell of revolution is in the air, and it smells like a new generation wrestling the wealth away from the old, and new culture bumping off the old guard. Finally.

At request of my handlers at 123ish.com, I plunged again into the Gamestop stock short raid and modern Bitcoin millionaires, and pointed out that this, at last, is the proverbial sacking of Rome writ in modern times and the movement of wealth from dusty old guys in suits to bright young kids who approach investing the way they do a World of Warcraft raid.

WallStreetWoW

Speaking of Bitcoin, JWZ, one of my old-skool-hacker idols, has lately become the Al Gore of cryptocurrency mining, yelling that we’re heating the Earth with our greed and we’re all doomed, doomed, DOOMED! He has headlines like “Bitcoin mine cargo container literally incinerating planet,” and more on his dunning-krugerrands tag.

Meanwhile I follow Satan on Twitter (don’t ask, it’s a long story), and come to find out Hell has its own cryptocurrency now. Because of course it does.

I think Satan and JWZ should meet, and possibly have a no-holds-barred brawl in the DNA Lounge for the destiny of this planet. Wouldn’t that be exciting, boys and girls?

Want to see what other cultural rat-traps I have been poking my battered nose into lately? Right this way…

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